20 comments:

All it said is that he was sorry he was late to the press conference. He was late because he had been having a conversation with Monsieur Putin. And he looked slightly exasperated about that conversation. Did I miss the humor?

You folks are missing the snarky words of the anchor who introduces the segment. He says that the clip shows Sarkozy emerging from a meeting with Putin "at which, apparently, Sarkozy had nothing to drink but water."

Ah, we were just, uh, talking with the Russians about Iran, and how to, uh, accommodate Iranian aspirations for nuclear weapons while ensuring our safety, and, well, what can I say? Um, appeasement is, ah, harder than it, uh, looks. I'll take questions...

Eric, is this common in French to say the opposite of what you think is so? "Il n'avait bu que de l'eau," is what I think the anchor says, or something close to that. Does that generally mean that someone is drunk?

He did seem a little bit out of it, but I thought he was out of breath from running to the press conference, rather than out of his mind.

I saw it (and heard it) the same way as Kirby. The anchor says Sarkozy apparently only had water to drink, and then Sarkozy apologizes for being late. He looked like he really needed to catch his breath after running up three flights of stairs.

"It is called "irony."Something that of course we do not do in English."

Of course we do it in English but there is no language so well adapted to insinuating the most precise shades of irony as French. Try reading "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" to see how destructive a weapon irony can be in the hands of a merciless practitioner.

I should have said is this something that French newscasters use quite often. I don't think this sort of deadpan irony would be used by an American newscaster. It would have to be signalled with all kinds of hand signals and winks, and even then ...

I'm surprised that the French news anchor used irony in this fashion. But I wouldn't know. I don't watch French television very often, and when I do I don't see this kind of thing. Perhaps this one news anchor is well known for this kind of thing.

Perhaps again he meant something else.

Or maybe he meant in fact to refer to the poisoning of Litvishenko or however it's spelled.

It's hard to know without seeing the entire clip, and then getting to know more about this specific newscaster and then the tradition of French newscasting. If this fellow was this subtle in terms of the irony that Eric claims, can anyone think of an American analogue?

What precisely was the point of this irony? Was he mocking Sarkozy, or mocking Putin?

Or was it just meant to be somewhat funny, and have no one take it seriously?